# Capitol Lunch Has Moved Twice and Never Left Main Street
Sophia Lampros didn’t set out to outshine her husband’s restaurant, but that’s roughly what happened. Peter Lampros had opened Oxford Lunch in New Britain after the family settled in Connecticut, and Sophia, working alongside him, had her own idea: a restaurant built entirely around the hot dog, with a meat sauce recipe she and Peter developed together. She opened Capitol Lunch in 1929 with one counter, twelve stools, and a five-item menu — hot dogs, soda, coffee, pie, and donuts, each a nickel — and it outgrew her husband’s restaurant before long.
The business survived the Depression and World War II serving New Britain’s factory workers, then changed hands in 1945 when the Lampros family sold to a close friend, Ernest Sangeloty. After Ernest’s death in 1957, his brother Nick Sangeloty and family friend Arthur Unaris took over and expanded the menu to include burgers, with hot dogs by then up to fifteen cents. In 1962, the building housing Capitol Lunch was slated for demolition, and rather than leave Main Street, the owners moved the operation across the street, setting up a window display of hot dogs grilling in plain view of passersby. By 1982, that location had become too small for the crowds it was drawing, and the business moved again, this time just next door, to 510 Main Street, where it remains.
Ownership passed by marriage and mentorship rather than open sale. Arthur Unaris’s son-in-law, Constantine Ververis, learned the operation working alongside his father-in-law before buying the business outright in 2004. Constantine’s sons, Gus and Arthur, now run Capitol Lunch as a third generation of family ownership, with a fourth generation reportedly already spending time around the restaurant.
The signature item is still the hot dog with the Famous Sauce, a recipe unchanged since Sophia Lampros and her husband worked it out in the late 1920s, loaded with mustard and chopped raw onions over the meat sauce. Burgers, fries, and onion rings round out a menu that has stayed deliberately compact across nearly a hundred years, resisting the kind of expansion that might dilute the one thing the restaurant has always been known for. The hot dog itself has gone from a nickel to under two dollars over the better part of a century, a pace of inflation that regulars sometimes bring up as its own kind of local trivia.
Capitol Lunch marked its 96th year in 2025 with a low-key celebration on National Hot Dog Day, the kind of milestone the restaurant tends to treat as one more ordinary day at the counter rather than an occasion for reinvention. The neon hot dog sign in the window — a fixture since the 1962 move — still marks the entrance for new customers and the regulars who’ve been ordering the same way for decades.
📍 510 Main Street, New Britain, CT
🕐 Mon–Sat 10 am–6 pm; closed Sun
🔗 capitollunch.com